● 05.13.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 13/05/2023: OpenBSD vi Backwards Search Bug, Bubble and Geminispace.org Introduced

Posted in News Roundup at 8:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• I love discovering authors I want to read despite the topic, their leanings, biases, etc.

• I’m not going to name any in these antenna-collected parts, because I’d not want to hurt any feelings, but also because of classic jinxing fear – in this case that mentioning a name would somehow (you know how this Murphy’s Law infused world is…) lead to their suddenly losing whatever their magick is.

• As i already mentioned, i would like to write fiction more frequently; i am mostly interested in short stories as a genre, and having read lots of them last summer, some short story’ plots have ocurred to me, although i didn’t use any of them in actual writing, in part because i have difficulties writing fiction, in part because they aren’t that good anyway.

• This is my second year growing tomatoes. Last year, I had a total crop of around half a dozen mostly mushy and small fruits. I’ve learnt a lot of lessons: this year I’ve started earlier, I’ve given them all more space, and I’m fertilising them regularly. They’re already doing very well. It’s just so satisfying to look out the window — no matter how my day is going — and see this little plants that I grew from seed become just that bit bigger. It’ll be even more satisfying when I can eat something that I grew that is truly delicious. Simply cannot wait.

• I had a ticket to see Darrin Hacquard play in my little town tonight with my mom-friend Emma (her daughter’s first daughter’s age-mate and friend). I was so excited! I’ve only been out in the evening without first daughter two or three times in the ~2 years since she was born. I met Darrin at a camp- fire and he played my wedding. I haven’t seen him since then, and couldn’t wait to see him again.

• Bad communication led to no childcare. Called around to the people who love first daughter. No one wanted to change their plans. Daughter knew I felt sad, resented her some and my friends more, so refused to sleep & tantrumed for 2 hours. Cancelled with Emma then thought I could at least come late when roommate got home, so she went and pointlessly waited on me.

• The last month has been mostly tough, with a few really good days. I loved digging garden beds when first daughter helped me pick out rocks. I loved watching first daughter meet a real live turkey for the first time and gobble at it. I loved going to church with first daughter and Matthew, then bike home through the rain laughing. I loved watching first daughter play at the Erlanger KY old train station playground.

Politics

• Years ago – after wondering what kept regularly so driving me out of my mind that I finally had to stop everything else to try to understand it – a phrase came to me.

• So one motivator for formulating the phrase was the dis-ease of feeling like I was regularly about to “lose my mind”.

• Another was that I’d had some “fundamentalist” days in my late youth, and so it wasn’t unusual for me to think in biblical tropes.

• And suddenly there it was: the phrase “The Zeroeth Commandment” came to mind.

Technical

• The OpenBSD vi† has a bug that prevents a backwards search for “?”—but only with “extended” regular expressions enabled—as “?” is special to both the command (which uses the delimiter “?” to indicate a backwards search) and to extended regular expressions (which use the “?” to indicate that the previous portion of the expression is optional. The command “??” indicates that the previous regular expression should be used, but the command “?\?” is an error because the search delimiter parser removes the “\” which leaves a search of “?” which is an invalid extended regular expression. After sleeping on this I figured that a search of “[?]” would also work; hiding characters in character classes also sees use to e.g. prevent a grep from seeing itself in the process table—but you probably instead want to use `pgrep foo` and not `ps … | grep ‘[f]oo’`. Anyways the command “?[\?]” works; the internal “?” must be escaped to prevent the outer command delimiter search from yielding the invalid expression of “[“.

• We had a good, OSR game today. This came in the shape of a Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) adventure that we could not finish for lack of time. But we were having a blast even as the premises were closing and made a point of meeting again same place, same time.

• I spent a couple hours today figuring out how to get the official [[Catppuccin]] theme for [[Gitea]] and [[Forgejo]] integrated into my [[NixOS]] environment. Originally, I had taken the user theme for Codeberg, tweaked and cleaned it up for my server, and then used that. But, I decided to go a little further and submitted a request to make it official. Someone then made an entirely new package and made it the official version[1]. After a little pouting, I decided that I’d rather have someone else maintain it so I can focus on other things.

• I’ve neither posted here nor on my personal gemlog for ages. Here, because I’m never sure what so say, except in someone else’s comment section. There, because most of the ideas I’ve had for posts are technology oriented (even if slightly weird technology), and I don’t want to contribute to the glut of tech content in Geminispace, relative to other content. I’ll at least do a book review, if nothing else.

Music

• I am listening to “Lady Picture Show” by STP, as it got stuck in my head earlier, and it sounds so weird. I was listening to Gordon Lightfoot the other night, and it sounded odd – like it was more or less chords and lyrics thought of “on the spot”, and then performed poorly. Like my mind/soul has become an ephemeral moment of self-amusing thought and feeling. No *direction*. No *goal*.

Announcements

• It is a Gemini-based bulletin board system that can be summarized as a union of Station, Reddit, WordPress, and issue trackers like GitHub Issues. It is implemented as an extension module to GmCapsule, my Gemini server.

• Although I have written Bubble primarily for my own needs, it is also purposefully designed to be generally useful for other individuals and communities.

Programming

• I’ve extended Laniakea to include a new TUI section

• I’m talking quite often about my progression toward command line interface (CLI) or text user interface (TUI) programs for my every day use. This is still an ongoing journey and it is not an easy journey so I thought why not document what I use, how I use it and add common keyboard navigation shortcuts to the mix.

• This post isn’t meant to start an argument about syntax highlighting in the context of code. It has its benefits and drawbacks, and I don’t care whether you like it or not. That being said, people arguing against it sometimes show a paragraph written in regular English with the different parts of speech highlighted, to show the absurdity of syntax highlighting. I don’t believe that is a valid argument. Prose is read linearly, while code is read more chaotically. When coding, your eyes often jump across the place – and color can help you quickly find code matching the pattern you’re looking for.

• More generally, the distinction is between passive reading, and editing. Thus, here’s my stupid idea – what if one actually used syntax highlighting for editing prose? Colors as vibrant as often used for programming would be too distracting, but toned down ones could perhaps help you scan your work easily. Different parts of sentences would be easier to find, repetetive sentences might stand out more, etc.

• I’ve used BSD ex/vi in anger myself. I’ve also used Heirloom ex/vi quite a lot. And BusyBox vi, which is surprisingly good. You can actually be very productive in such a minimalist environment, being as it is so distraction free and responsive. This is especially true if you’re not in a graphical session.

• I have to believe someone else has thought of this before, but my head occasionally likes pursuing rhyme, and while staring at the IDE acronym in a Linux context the phrase “IDEs of Arch” suddenly came to mind….

• [...]

• My wife and I argued a bit because I’m constantly trying to find non-hurtful/belittling ways to tell her I think she talks too much for my mind’s inbound capacity. What happens is my mind quickly feels as though a pot of popcorn popping, and then goes into a fugue-like state to protect itself, leading to my not remembering nearly enough of what she’s said, which invariably leadeth unto her being upset with me for “never listening to what I have to say”… and, of course, I start out listening, but basically can’t continue without possibly risking early stages of nervous breakdown….

• Regarding the current IDE-vs-text-editor discourse, not to be cute, but years ago, when I was fresh out of school and working my first programming job outside of an academic setting, I remember talking with a senior dev on my company’s kernel team. He was (and probably still is) a huge emacs evangelist. We talked about tooling. And I remember him telling me, “Use the best tools available on your platform. On Windows, that Visual Studio.”

• He wasn’t wrong (though it should be noted, this was in the context of C++ programming). And that was when Visual Studio was a lot more heavyweight. These days, it’s a lot more lightweight, updates are quicker, and it’s generally just a lot nicer to use. Not to mention, it’s also free. I remember having to finangle an academic license for years after I dropped out of grad school – Visual Studio wasn’t cheap in those years. But using it now is great.

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